by Oliver North
The reply was given to the blindfolded Germans and they were escorted back to their vehicle. Our platoon commander watched them read McAullife’s response. They clearly couldn’t figure it out. But they went on their way. That was it.
The German commanders were perplexed about the meaning of the strange American reply, but it became one of the most famous military communications of all time—and when it was reported to the press by Bradley’s headquarters, it cheered the American people back home. But the battle was far from over and the SS would wreak more deadly havoc on both soldiers and civilians.
The next morning, 23 December, the weather cleared—allowing U.S. C-47 transport planes to drop supplies to the beleaguered American garrison in Bastogne. On Christmas Eve the vanguard of Patton’s armor arrived on the outskirts of the city and the following morning, his U.S. 4th Armored began a limited counter-offensive—despite air attacks by the Luftwaffe against targets in and around Bastogne.
On 26 December, British Lancaster bombers attacked the Germans at St. Vith and that afternoon, the skies were still clear and calm enough to permit twenty-five Waco CG-4A gliders to land near Bastogne with essential supplies of ammunition, food, and medicine for the pinned-down GIs.
Over the next four days the British 30th Corps in the north and Patton’s 7th Armored Corps from the south started pinching off the “bulge” that the Germans had made in the Allied lines. Though it was not yet evident to Hitler, the threat to Antwerp was over. On New Year’s Day he launched the last massed attack made by the Luftwaffe in the war—sending more than 600 aircraft against Allied airfields and installations in Belgium. Although nearly 200 U.S. and British aircraft were destroyed—most of them on the ground and many of them shot down by German anti-aircraft batteries as the planes returned from their raids—it cost the Luftwaffe dearly, as they lost twice as many planes—nearly 400 aircraft.
By 8 January the Panzers were practically out of fuel and von Rundstedt appealed to Hitler to withdraw the remaining Panzers back to the frontier while they still had fuel and ammunition enough to make it. The Führer refused—but then, a few hours later, granted an identical request made by Sepp Dietrich. By 16 January, Patton and Montgomery had linked up at Houffalize and began “mopping up” German units scattered behind the new Allied front line. It was only then that senior U.S. commanders became aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the SS troops during the battle.
Early in the Ardennes offensive some German troops had donned American uniforms in order to penetrate American positions. Though this act was regarded to be “unlawful” it paled by comparison to the wholesale murders of U.S. prisoners of war who were captured by Dietrich’s storm troopers in the initial stages of the battle. At Malmedy, St. Vith, and at several smaller engagements, more than 350 Americans and nearly 100 Belgian civilians were machine-gunned to death in cold blood by their German captors—many of them on the order of SS Standartenführer Jochaom Peiper, one of Dietrich’s most fanatical SS commanders. Staff Sergeant Bill Merriken of Bedford, Virginia, was wounded and then captured near Malmedy. He was one of the few survivors of an SS killing spree near the little village of Geromont.
STAFF SERGEANT WILLIAM “BILL” MERRIKEN
Battery B
285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion
Geromont-Noville, Belgium
17 December 1944
I was an artillery forward observer. My team conducted surveys for artillery batteries, laid-in wire to the Fire Direction Center from other forward observers, plotted the locations of enemy targets, called for fire—we did it all.
On 16 December when the Germans came through the Ardennes, we had been in the same area of Belgium for about two weeks. Most of the time, my team had been responding to incoming artillery fire from the Germans—and called in “counter-battery fire.”
This was a very active area. Occasionally a German aircraft would fly in low and strafe our artillery battery. The day after the Ardennes battle started, our battery commander got orders to move west because German armor had broken through our lines to the east.
We were moving in a convoy of about thirty vehicles on the morning of 17 December—with perhaps 120 men in the trucks. We stopped one time for chow—just off the road. A short while later we were stopped again because German paratroopers had landed in the wooded area near the road. But as we started up again, the convoy was taken under fire by German artillery and we were forced to stop, dismount, and take cover.
Most of us jumped in the ditch beside the road for some sort of protection. A short while later we heard the rumbling of tanks approaching. When the lead German tank came around a bend in the road, it opened fire on us—taking out our vehicles and shooting at us in the ditches.
A German officer was standing in the turret of the tank and he was firing the machine gun on the turret. When he got to where we were, the tank stopped and he shouted to us—in English—“Get up! Get up! Up!”
When we got out of the ditch, he motioned us to the rear of his tank where another German officer told us, “If you don’t all surrender, you will be killed.” We were outnumbered and there wasn’t anything we could do against the tanks so we did. We were told to follow at the back of the column of German tanks.
After walking for a few miles we arrived at a field that we thought was going to be a holding area for POWs. The Germans had their tanks and half-tracks lined up on the road, with the barrels of their weapons pointed in our direction. A small group of German troops searched each prisoner—taking any watches, rings, or weapons that they found. They then motioned for us to gather in the center of the field. My group was among the last to get to the cluster of American POWs, so we were out front of the whole group,
While we were standing there, a German officer standing in the back of a half-track took out his pistol and shot one of our guys. I guess that was the signal, as all the machine guns started firing. The one closest to me swung around and started chattering and I turned around and fell flat on my stomach. As I fell, two machine gun bullets hit me in the back. As I lay there I could hear the bullets hitting the ground, hitting the bodies around me. There was terrible screaming from those who were wounded.
Then, the firing stopped and a squad of Germans came out into the field checking on those who were still alive. If anyone moaned or moved they shot them immediately. And then to make sure, they would kick the bodies or hit them with rifle butts. I could hear one of them say, over and over, in English, “Are you all right—are you all right?” And if one of our boys said anything, the German would shoot him with his pistol. That went on for quite a while, because it takes a good bit of time to murder more than a hundred men, even with machine guns.
I could hear all this going on, but I couldn’t see it because a dead American soldier had fallen on top of me. I could hear the sound of the Germans talking and their boots crunching through the ice in that field. At one point they stood directly over the two of us, speaking in German and then, one of them fired his pistol. The bullet went through the guy on top of me, and hit me in the right knee. It hurt terribly, but I didn’t move or make a sound. My face was being pressed into the ground so they couldn’t see the vapor from my breath in the cold air.
I guessed that the Germans left—and after awhile I heard other guys in the pile of bodies whispering to each other. Somebody said, “Let’s make a break.” I thought, this might be the only opportunity I have. I either have to do it now or I won’t make it. So I struggled to get up and stand but because I had lost a lot of blood and the injury to my right knee, I knew I couldn’t go very far. That’s when I saw a shed, not far from the edge of the field.
As I started to drag myself toward the shed, most of the other survivors of the massacre took off in the opposite direction, toward the woods. The Germans began firing at them again, swinging their machine guns around to shoot at the group. They didn’t see me. I got across the open field to a fence, climbed over, and got into the wooden shed where I passed ou
t.
Just before dawn I came to and looked out. In the light from a burning building down this little lane, I saw a GI that I knew, crawling along on the opposite side of the road. His name was Chuck Redding—and his unit had been overrun the previous afternoon and he was trying to get back to American lines. He was the first person to save my life.
Chuck and I made our way over another field to some high ground where we spent the rest of the day in a thicket. I was too weak from loss of blood to go any further and he stayed with me. The next morning we couldn’t see any Germans around so we started on our way again. As we were passing a house, a Belgian man, milking his cow, looked up, saw us, and motioned for us to come inside. He and Chuck got me into the house, and put me on a bench behind the kitchen door.
The man left to talk to his wife, and then she went around and closed the shutters and doors. I suppose he went back to milking his cow. The woman came over with a pan of water and wanted to know where I was hurt.
She wanted to take my shirt off. I said, “No, no, no!” And that was a good thing, because if she had pulled it off, she couldn’t have helped me. All the blood had clotted to my shirt and if she had taken it off, I probably would have bled to death from the wounds in my back. She gave me a few sips of potato soup and I passed out again.
Somehow the farmer and Chuck got me upstairs to their bedroom. When I came to I was in a huge bed, and when the woman came into the room I said, “I’m sorry. I bled all over the sheets, everywhere.”
Chuck was at the window, watching for Germans. He came over and said, “Sergeant, I’ve been downstairs in the kitchen, trying to tell her that we need to get you some medical help but I couldn’t make myself understood so I wrote a note for her to take to the American lines to get a medic or some aid to come and help you.” He also told me that one time during the night the Germans came and banged on the door and questioned the old lady. And evidently she gave the right answers, because they left.
Chuck said he had watched out the window as the woman put the note in her brassiere and start down the road. He assumed she took the note to the American line at the town. Or so we thought at the time.
Some time later an ambulance came. I heard the vehicle coming up the road, but I didn’t know what it was. Chuck wasn’t in the room then—he was downstairs. Then I heard this guy in heavy boots running up the steps. He pushed open the door, picked up everything that was attached to me, including their bedding, and carried me down the steps, and outside. He and the other Americans waiting outside put me on a litter.
The lady of the house came over, bent over and kissed me on the cheek, and she was crying. And before you know it, we took off down the hill in the ambulance. In a few minutes we were at the warehouse they were using as an aid station. After looking at my wounds, they put me in another ambulance and took me to the school they were using as a hospital, then took me into the surgery and removed the bullets.
The next day I went on a hospital train to Paris. From there they put me on another hospital train all the way to Le Havre, close to the docks, where they loaded me on the hospital ship and we crossed the channel on 27 December, and I was admitted to a hospital in Melbourne, England.
It would take fifty years for Bill Merriken to find out what really happened to that note. Madame Blaise, wife of the farmer, was much too frightened to go through the American and German lines. Instead, she went to the house next door that belonged to the family of sixteen-year-old newspaper delivery boy Emile Jamar.
EMILE JAMAR
Noville, Belgium
21 December 1944
Madame Blaise was very worried about the fighting and was afraid of the Germans. So were my parents. She was very fearful of going into town to find the Americans. When the Germans returned, most people stayed inside because of all the shooting—and because you never knew what the Germans might do to you if they caught you. But I had seen the Americans and I liked them—even though we were all very concerned that the Germans had come back into our country.
I had been into the town the day before and had seen the Americans at the School for Girls in the town. I told Madame Blaise that I would deliver the note for her. My parents didn’t want me to go, but I told them, “Someone must deliver this message—otherwise this soldier is going to die. So I am going to take this message to the Americans. The Germans will not stop me—I am just a boy, after all.”
I went on the road part way to Norville until I saw German soldiers ahead setting up a gun and putting in mines along the road. So after watching them for a while, I went through a field and then through some woods—looking very carefully for mines.
When I got to Norville—it was a very small town in those days—a soldier took me to an American officer and I gave him the note. I could speak a little English so I understood what he wanted when he asked me to show them the way.
The American soldiers put together a group of trucks—some of them had large guns on them—and we went back down the road to where
I lived. On the way I showed them where the Germans were placing the mines and where they had been setting up a gun. But by the time we got there, the Germans were gone.
We went to the Blaise home and the American soldiers went inside. My parents called to me then and I went to tell them that all was well. As I returned, they were carrying the wounded soldier out of the house and put him into a truck with a red cross on it. As they carried him out, I saw Madame Blaise bend over and give him a kiss, but I did not get to talk to the wounded man. They left immediately and went back toward Norville.
But Bill Merriken and Emile Jamar did finally meet—in 1999 at the site of the Malmedy Massacre. Merriken had written Belgian friends that he would visit them during a trip he was taking to Europe to commemorate his WWII experiences. Emile, now in his sixties, wanted to meet the wounded man who rode away that day in an ambulance that he had made possible, and thereby saving Bill’s life.
As the two men came together, Bill began to weep and laugh at the same time. He said, “I’m so thankful.”
Emile said of the meeting, “To know him not five minutes and see the tears streaming down his face . . . there was a bond that formed between us in that moment.”
This “Battle of the Bulge” was Hitler’s last futile attempt at any kind of offensive operation. Though it cost the Allies nearly 20,000 killed and 15,000 POWs, it had destroyed two Panzer armies—nearly 100,000 killed, wounded, and captured. None of those troops, their 800 tanks, 3,000 vehicles or 400 aircraft lost in Autumn Mist would be there when Hitler needed them to stop the Red Army as it closed in on Berlin.
During the Battle of the Bulge, the sheer courage of the American fighting man prevented a disaster and eventually won a bloody victory. This epic triumph wasn’t achieved by the brilliance of military strategists. It was won by hundreds of thousands of ordinary GIs in their foxholes . . . exhausted, low on ammunition, hungry, freezing—who simply refused to give up—men who witnessed their friends blown to pieces, but who mustered the courage to fight on day after day, denying Hitler the success he so desperately needed.
CHAPTER 14
THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER AND THE THIRD REICH 1945
The Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s Autumn Mist December 1944 offensive in the Ardennes, had proven to be an unmitigated disaster for the Third Reich. By New Year’s Day 1945, American, British, and Red Army offensives were closing in on Germany’s industrial heartland and Berlin from the east, south, and west. At the Argonaut Conference in Yalta—4–11 February—Churchill, Stalin, and an ailing Roosevelt met to map out final strategy for how the Führer would be finished off—and the shape of postwar Europe.
Churchill left Yalta disappointed. Roosevelt, clearly ill and in failing health, was unable or unwilling to stand up to Stalin’s demands for hegemony over Eastern Europe. To his chagrin, the “United Nations”—as the Allies had taken to describing themselves in press releases—announced “unanimous” withdrawal of recognition for the Polish
government in exile that had been resident in London since 1940. Even before Hitler’s final defeat, the fissures that would dominate European politics for more than four decades were beginning to show.
Roosevelt departed from the Crimea convinced that a plan had been put in place for the “cooperative administration” of postwar Germany—divided into four “occupation zones”—U.S., British, Russian, and French. He had also won acquiescence from the Soviet and British leaders to publicly try the leaders of the Reich as “war criminals” before an international tribunal. But he also left the Black Sea port a dying man.
Stalin returned to Moscow determined to become the arbiter of continental Europe and with an understanding that Berlin would fall to the Red Army. While the “Big Three” posed for photographs at the conference, Soviet Field Marshall Georgi Zhukov’s Red Army columns were barely fifty miles from Berlin.
None of the three leaders foresaw that Hitler—or the German people—would invite Armageddon by continuing to resist the Allied onslaught. Once again, the leaders of the “Grand Alliance” had underestimated their adversary.
On both the eastern and western fronts, the Wehrmacht was being battered incessantly. And in the east, millions of terrified German civilians were fleeing the approaching Russians. The brutal savagery of the vengeful Red Army was well beyond anything that even Paul Goebbels’ propaganda could envision. Rape, torture, and murder of German civilians became so prevalent that many fathers killed their wives and daughters rather than subject them to the “tender mercies” of the Russian enemy. The atrocities made the Wehrmacht fight even harder.
By the time the Allied heads of state gathered at Yalta, all of Germany was being subjected to round-the-clock air bombardment, reducing whole cities to gutted, smoking ruins. There was little food, fuel, heat, or electricity available in much of the country. Yet the Germans resisted.
